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Every January, Miyuki leaves her girlfriend to spend two weeks in a tiny windswept Welsh village.

There she sips Brains beer in the local pub, The Anchor, and listens to the amiable, bovine chat of the regulars â Short Mr Hughes, Tall Mr Hughes, Septic Barry and Mr Puw.

On a whim, she decides to spraypaint a rock gold so that it will glow in the setting sun and cheer everyone up. Tall Mr Hughes catches her in the act. Then he disappears. That’s about it as far as plot goes in Rhodes’s pointless novel.

Rhodes has established a cult following for his witty, slyly subversive writing but here he deploys artless prose, seemingly only in order to make a virtue out of its own banality â a miserable experience for the reader.

There are some authors, such as Magnus Mills, who really do excel at finding sinister undercurrents in surface rhythms of everyday life.

But Rhodes’s book actually manages to be even more vacuous than the characters he writes about, which is some achievement.